CURSE OF THE STARVING CLASS
Whether through fear, habit, or fate, Sam Shepard’s characters in Curse of the Starving Class just can’t figure out the jumps–how to see the patterns in life. For them the big links –within the family, between the family and outsiders, between humans and the land, and between generations–snapped sometime before the play begins. What we see merely completes the curse.
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Vintage Shepard from the early 70s, the play charts the ordeal of a sitcom family turned surreal. Shepard paints their doom in telling stage pictures, many having to do with food: a refrigerator that, empty or full, satisfies no appetite; food that’s cooked but seldom eaten; a pile of soiled laundry; a smashed kitchen door that leaves the home open to anyone; a maggot-ridden, sickly lamb. Most haunting is the description of an eagle and a cat that tear each other apart in the sky–because it’s so close to what the Tates do to each other.
The parents’ hostility and fear also infest the children. Emma, an earsplittingly loud tomboy, wants to run off and become a mechanic in some far-off town. The other alternative is to embark on a life of crime. Whichever comes first.
Clearly relishing his theater’s vast stage, director Randall Arney has created cunning images of his own–most of them, unfortunately, more vivid than the script. In Kevin Rigdon’s sprawling set, huge transformers and power lines menace the home; the cutaway kitchen looks very vulnerable (but sadly it undermines the force of that crucial missing door). Richard Woodbury’s sound design catches even the sinister hum of the power lines. Rigdon’s cycloramic backdrop subtly reflects his own wonderful lighting: a bright blue sky can crash into black, curdle to red, or flicker and flame to show an offstage explosion.
